


o churl

by clumsyhearts



Category: Anne with an E (TV)
Genre: F/M, Modern AU, anne admit your feelings already, happy ending if you squint, hell yeah pining!, in which i am an idiot, it's a....tragicomedy?, kids quote romeo and juliet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2020-04-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:33:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23579218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clumsyhearts/pseuds/clumsyhearts
Summary: “What, are you Juliet?” Anne laughs. He’s better than Charlie, at least, but alsoveryclose to her face. Their noses are a breath’s width apart and he’s leaning down the five inches that it takes to be at her height. He’s so close she can see the little smatterings of freckles right underneath his unfairly dark eyelashes. His curls brush against her forehead. The effect is overwhelming.“Yes, now shut up,” he says....Or: Anne and Gilbert find they have a penchant for quoting Shakespeare.
Relationships: Gilbert Blythe/Anne Shirley
Comments: 47
Kudos: 197





	o churl

**Author's Note:**

> loosely based on [this drawing by lillyre on tumblr](https://lillyre.tumblr.com/post/161521466005/i-love-anne-and-gilbert-since-i-was-a-child-so), thank you thank you thank you

Seventh-hour theater class segues nicely into Drama Club after school on Fridays, which segues nicely into auditions for the spring play, which allows Anne to go home on Fridays with a strong appreciation for the theater and often causes damage to Marilla and Matthew’s sanity as she recites – nay, _performs_ – the great works being studied by the young thespians at Avonlea Public High School. On this particular Friday, Miss Stacey’s class of performers had just finished their Greek tragedy unit and were moving rapidly along in history to the Bard.

“Shakespeare,” Miss Stacey lectures her standing gaggle of students, “wrote thirty-eight plays, and they were renowned for involving clever wordplay, double entendre, soliloquies, and poetry within dialogue, although his plays were written in the modern language of the wildly exciting sixteenth century. Now, who can tell me, what’s a Shakespeare play we’ve studied in, say, freshman-level English with yours truly?” Seeing Anne’s fingers grace the sky, reaching for the ceiling, Miss Stacey sighs, “Anyone except Anne.” The class is silent save a few rustling papers.

“Come _on_ ,” she groans, “theater is an easy class, folks, and I had most of you for honors English nine!”

Moody delicately places his hand in the air, wavering as if he’s not sure about the correct answer.

“Give it a go.”

“Uh… _Romeo and Juliet_?” he asks.

“Yes!” Miss Stacey cries, and the classroom shares a sigh of relief. “One of the most revered romance stories of all time. Even though its moral is deceptively dark and the play ends… well, badly, it’s still one of Shakespeare’s better stories. And today, to warm us up to reading the whole play all the way through… _again_ , for some of you… we’ll be performing the final scene.”

Anne notices her classmate’s reactions to Miss Stacey’s lecture. Tillie’s eyebrows quirk in their thin and adorable manner – one arching down, the other arching upwards. 

“Yes, Tillie.”

“Why the last scene? Why would we spoil it for ourselves?”

Anne rolls her eyes good-naturedly. “Til, you read it freshman year, remember?”

“Well, I don’t remember how it _ends_!”

“Okay, enough!” Miss Stacey laughs. “It’s a famous play, Tillie, you’ll likely remember how it ends. Because it goes poorly. Really, the only person here who has an exemption from knowing the ending is Anne, because she wasn’t here freshman year to read it.”

“Oh, I’ve read it, Miss Stacey, I’ve read most of Shakespeare’s works, they’re simply –”

“Thank you, Anne!” Shaking her head and laughing, Miss Stacey gestures to their small stage within the classroom. Decorated with some cutout stars hanging from the ceiling and adorned with a few pillows, the class had worked hard to create a homely environment for their theater, in conjunction with their _Adjective to Describe Our Class_ : friendly. “Now, I want you all to vote on who will play your titular roles. Romeo and Juliet are at once very layered and very simple characters, with motivations and passions, and they’re deeply in lust at this point in the play, so I want you to think carefully and pick the right classmates for the –”

“Anne should do it,” Ruby gasps. “She’s ever so dramatic. She’d be perfect.”

Anne, knowing how Juliet was never considered the most logical or smart character in the play, mutters, “Thank you, Ruby.” Accepting her fate and her copy of the script, she climbs to the elevated platform and lays down among the cushions. 

“Alright, so who’s her dashing Romeo going to be? Any takers?” Miss Stacey prods at the students. “Come on, I won’t make you kiss or anything like that. Just reciting lines.”

“I’ll do it,” Charlie Sloane says, pushing forward from the throng in all his gangly, awkwardly tall glory. His classmates buzz. Charlie never volunteered unless he was being hung upside down and fed to the sharks. And only then, he only liked the comedic roles. 

_Oh, no_ , Anne thinks from her position amongst the pillows. She pushes herself up to the elbows to see Charlie receive his script, fumble to the correct page, trip on the way up to the stage, and offer her a decidedly un-cute smile as he knelt by her side. 

“This is going to be great!” Miss Stacey shrieks. Her enthusiasm for the theater combined with enthusiasm for Shakespeare was a lethal combination. And unfortunately, Drama Club was after this. And then auditions. The school bell would not be the end of this strange torture.

Acting opposite Charlie was a total disaster, and a serious mood killer, and Anne had to be twice more enthusiastic than normal to make up for his lack of…well, pizzazz. And the man had Broadway aspirations!

 _This is going to be a nightmare_ , Anne thinks, sinking back into the pillows, _but the show must go on_.

…

Tossing her keys on the mudroom bench and yanking off her boots, Anne comes home, in a blaze of glory and exhaustion. Drama Club was _never_ this taxing, even when Josie insisted upon doing everyone’s full stage makeup before their simple activities. Even when Moody had tripped and broken three of the irreplaceable props they’d needed for the fall musical. On opening night. Even when Anne had been forced to fire Moody from props duty, regardless of how much she didn’t want to. _Sure_ , he was clumsy from time to time, but so was she, and that was no excuse to exclude someone from a production.

As she tugs at the stubborn left boot, she’s reminded by the raucous laughter from the living room that theater today had been full of so much drama that she’d forgotten about Friday night dinners with the Blythe-LaCroix family. As Bash puts it, Friday nights were “so that the kids can cook and us adults can relax and talk shit about you.” And as Marilla adds, “so I can drink sherry with adults and not just Matthew.” To which Matthew, blushing, nods.

Anne and Gilbert are the dictionary definition of _too many cooks in a kitchen_ , fighting hopelessly over ingredients, counter space, recipes, so they split the deal, alternating meals each Friday. Gilbert is hopeless in a kitchen, though. His solidly achievable meals include pasta – _“Any dipshit can boil water, Gilbert”_ – or hamburgers – _“Wow, I’m so impressed, you can heat up a hunk of store-bought meat and make it taste good.”_ “You jest, Shirley-Cuthbert,” he said once, “but I don’t see any sort of culinary masterpieces being brought to the table here.” She’d smacked him with a spatula and ordered him out of the kitchen for two minutes to “think about what he’d done.” 

She was glad, glad they were close this year, glad they were only fighting over stupid things. Especially glad to remember that it was Gilbert’s week to cook and that her only responsibility was to thoroughly make fun of him.

“Hey,” he says when she slips into the kitchen after waving to Matthew and Marilla and Mary and Bash. 

“Hey yourself,” she returns, hopping onto the counter and rubbing his curls affectionately. “How was school? Haven’t seen you all day.”

“Sorry I skipped lunch,” Gilbert says, setting a pan of water on the stove to boil. “I had to finish my chemistry lab today and I had too many trials left for class time, so I came in early and skipped lunch to finish it. Anyway, it’s done now, and I only had to listen to my stomach grumble through the rest of the day.”

“Put a lid on it.”

“What? You mock my pain?” He laughs. “ _Anne_ , I thought better of –”

“ _No_ , dumb-dumb, a lid on the _pan_ , the water’ll boil faster.”

He grins at her, the wicked crooked grin she likes. “Oh.”

He knows where all her cooking equipment is. They’ve been doing these Friday night dinners since last year, when Gilbert’s father died and he’d spent a month living with the Cuthberts, and when Mary and Bash had moved in with him, they’d made a habit of spending some time together. _Family supports family_ , Matthew had said, holding Gilbert’s frame flush against his in a bone-crushing Matthew Cuthbert hug. _That’s how we do it, here._

“I want to tell you,” Anne says, swinging her legs from the countertop, “about theater class today.”

“You always want to tell me about theater class. _Ooh, how dreamy, how romantic, Moody’s in my class, Charlie wants to be on Broadway_ –”

“I’ll _actually_ hit you, Gilbert, I _will –”_

__

“Peace, good lady!” he laughs, holding his hands in the air in mock surrender. “You know I always want to hear your tales of woe.”

She smacks him in the arm anyways as he laughs and turns back to the stovetop. 

“Okay, so we just finished our Greek unit, and we’re moving along to our Shakespeare unit, which means that we’re going to read _Romeo and Juliet_ and perform bits of it. Miss Stacey decided today that to get us into the mood, we were going to be performing the final scene –”

“The one where they both die?” Gilbert interrupts.

“Yes, that one. So Miss Stacey is asking for us to decide as a class and Ruby goes ‘Oh, Anne’s dramatic, she’d be perfect.’ And I mean, _thanks_ , but being immediately cast to play the role of Juliet, a famously illogical character whose sole character trait is her teenage temper… It was a blow, let me say. Unintentional, but whatever. I accepted, because what else am I supposed to do? And I’ve got the script and then _Charlie_ fucking _Sloane_ –”

“Language!” shouts Marilla from the other room.

“Sorry, Charlie _freaking_ Sloane, Charlie gets cast as Romeo.”

“Oh God,” Gilbert chuckles. “What a power couple.”

Anne raises her hand warningly and Gilbert puts his hands up in surrender, leaning against the countertop. “So you have to act opposite Charlie in the world’s most romantic play, big deal. Why are you so hung up on it?” 

“Well, I haven’t gotten through the whole story yet,” Anne says. “At first I was just annoyed because it’s terrible to act opposite Charlie. The man has zero passion. So I knew that acting opposite him meant I was going to have to step it up, which is just exhausting. And it’s a tragedy, which is not his forte of theatrical work. You know, I told Miss Stacey we should have done _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ and I would have been the greatest Puck of all –”

“Language!” Marilla’s shout punctuates her sentence, sending Gilbert off in a peal of laughter.

Anne retorts, “Puck, Marilla, like the character! Shakespeare! Not swearing! … Anyway, Charlie starts delivering his monologue from the death scene, because we skipped all the fighting at the front, and I’m just lying there, you know, fake-dead, he gets through the poison scene with the least amount of theatrical gusto I’ve ever seen, and flops down next to me, dead. And that’s when Juliet comes in. She’s got a really sad little soliloquy after Friar Lawrence leaves, like ten lines, tops, so I’m performing them.

“And I get to the part where she says – God, it’s – _‘O churl, drunk all, and left no friendly drop to help me after? I will kiss thy lips. Haply some poison yet doth hang on them.’_ And Charlie, hearing me say kiss, realizes that oh yeah, Romeo and Juliet _are_ supposed to kiss in this scene, except it’s just Juliet kissing Romeo’s dead lips, and he picks up his head and goes in for it!”

Gilbert, who at this point is facing away from her, checking the water again, is laughing. She can tell because his shoulders are shaking.

“Oh, shut up, I know it’s embarrassing!”

“No, no,” he says, turning around and trying as best he can to stifle the laughter. “It’s just… Wow. It’s more embarrassing for Charlie than for you, really. I mean, he knew he was dead, right?” 

“I would bloody well hope so!” Anne shouts, then lowers her voice again. One side of Gilbert’s mouth is turned up hopelessly. She has this effect on him.

“So what happened?” he says, leaning against her legs, still dangling off the counter. She sits back on her tailbone, braces herself with her hands behind her, and sighs. 

“Miss Stacey interrupts, of course, pretty much as soon as he started to move, and says something like ‘Charlie, you don’t have to kiss her, you’re dead’ and everybody laughs. They let me finish the soliloquy, and then Miss Stacey cuts us off and the class laughs through the applause and Miss Stacey said something about never letting Charlie play a serious role again. All in good fun. So it was fine, just… then we were doing Shakespeare for the rest of Drama Club, and my audition for the play is a piece from _Much Ado About Nothing_ , and Charlie kept staring at me like _oh my God I almost kissed her_ , so it was just a long day.”

Gilbert shakes his head, pushing himself off her legs to check the water again. “God. That’s hilarious. Poor Charlie.”

“Poor _Charlie_?” Anne yelps, ready to deck him in the ribs, until she sees he’s grinning at her again, _wicked man_. She rolls her eyes good-naturedly and sits back. “I hope Charlie doesn’t volunteer to play Romeo throughout the rest of the play if I’m still playing Juliet. I’ll die. I can’t even practice scenes with him.”

“I’ll help,” Gilbert says, as he pours the pasta into the boiling water and lowers the temperature. “Can you toss me the tomato sauce? Yeah, I’ll be your scene partner. What was it? _O charl_ –”

“ _Churl_ –”

“ _O churl_ ,” he murmurs, grabbing her hands and tugging her off the counter so she was standing on the floor in front of him. “ _Drunk all, and left no_ – Be dead, Anne – _left no friendly drop to help me after_?” 

“What, are you Juliet?” Anne laughs. He’s better than Charlie, at least, but also _very_ close to her face. Their noses are a breath’s width apart and he’s leaning down the five inches that it takes to be at her height. He’s so close she can see the little smatterings of freckles right underneath his unfairly dark eyelashes. His curls brush against her forehead. The effect is overwhelming.

“Yes, now shut up,” he says. Lowering his voice, he continues, “As I was saying. _I will kiss thy lips. Haply some poison doth yet hang on them_.”

“Enough,” she chuckles, shoving him backwards. He’s grinning again, a grin that says he was better than Charlie, a grin that says he was close to her, close enough to kiss. It’s intoxicating. Anne’s head reels. “Skip to the part where she dies.”

“God, I don’t remember the lines,” he mutters. “Uh, something about a happy dagger, and then –” He drives an invisible knife into his heart and mock collapses against the counter, groaning in all the fake glory of a stage death.

“A touch too dramatic, but I’ll give it to you,” Anne says, hopping back onto the counter. “Certainly better than my scene partner for sure.”

He pumps his fist into the air. “Victory.”

She throws her head back and laughs.

…

Not that anyone else cares, but it becomes their thing, the _O churl_ line. They’ve got plenty of _things_ – _Chopping onions?_ whenever one of them is crying for no good reason, or their best impression of a squirrel sound whenever one of them says something stupid –because any two people who spend as much time together as Anne and Gilbert do have inside jokes, but this is Anne’s favorite. It’s stupid, really, and entertaining, but whenever Anne gets mildly annoyed at the lack of a liquid, she mutters the line to herself, and if Gilbert’s nearby he’ll just laugh. 

Gilbert told her it was stupid, but she caught him once, mouth full of the phrase as he discovered he was out of water. “O churl, drunk all?” he had muttered, as if it were a swear, and Anne just looked at him with raised eyebrows until he realized what he’d said and thrown a hand towel at her. “Shut up,” he’d demanded.

“I didn’t say anything,” she’d said, hands in surrender, trying her hardest to contain the laughter.

Afterwards, they’d both leaned into the phrase as their own, ribbing each other with the dialogue when it worked, but it was often weeks in between the usage of the phrase before a situation arose again. She didn’t mind, although the first occurrence often plagued her memory. The feeling of standing so close to Gilbert, nose upturned to study his face, close enough to feel his breath, was not an easily shakable feeling. Anne didn’t like losing Gilbert’s company, and so refused to let the situation embarrass her enough to keep her away – she knew he was just ribbing her – but before she fell asleep at night she often remembered the hazy wish to touch his face, trace his brow, count the little freckles.

One arid Sunday morning in April, Anne had been sent to the Blythe-LaCroix house to help with planting a vegetable garden. Their orchard hardly required planting in the spring, unless a tree had died the previous year, so unlike the Cuthberts, Gilbert rarely had to do serious planting work in the spring. This year, though, Mary had decided to start a vegetable garden, and Anne was drafted into help building the raised beds and planting the seeds.

“You go now,” Matthew said, buttoning his Sunday shirt for church, “since you hardly come to church anyhow, and Marilla and I will be over after the service to help Mary with the plantin’.”

Anne had nodded, tightening her overall straps, and taken her car over to their farm. Anne and Gilbert lived the furthest away from Avonlea Public High School, being on two plots of large farmland rather than on smaller farms or in the suburbs, but they didn’t live so far from one another. If Anne hadn’t been bringing a bag of planting soil and her shovel, she would have walked.

“Hey,” she shouts at Gilbert as she clambers out of her car.

“Hey yourself,” he yells back, abandoning Bash at the saw in the garage, where they were cutting wood planks for the base of the bed. 

“Blythe, you dirty bastard, you didn’t teach me how to use this model,” Bash shouts, following Gilbert on his path to Anne’s car. Seeing Anne appear from the back as she lugged the heavy bag of soil, his face splits into a grin, contagious in the manner that only Bash could pull off. “Hey, redhead, long time no see.”

“Hey, Bash,” Anne says, returning the grin. “What’re we planting?”

“Well, first we have’ta build the beds, which Blythe here was just showin’ me how to do when you came. But then, Mary’s off getting seeds for some cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, gourds, strawberries, beans, and –”

“Carrots,” Gilbert finishes, the wicked grin present once more across his lips. Anne, hands full, could do nothing but kick at his shins, to which he laughed. “Here, let me help,” he says, taking the bag off her hands. Normally, she would resist, insisting she carry it herself, but now she lets him take the heavy bag and then punches him in the shoulder. 

“Bash, I’ll show you how to use the saw,” Anne says, rolling up her loose short sleeves to her shoulders. “We can ditch slowpoke Doctor Blythe and his unwanted puns about certain hair colors if we speed up.”

“Oh ho, still bitter, are we?” Gilbert crows. Anne sticks her tongue out at him.

Later, after Anne and Gilbert and Bash had fought their way through splinters and about seven bags of soil to assemble the beds, and after Mary had returned with the seeds and joined their planting committee, and after Anne had explained that pumpkins had to go in the back of a vegetable garden, otherwise they would grow into the paths of the other vegetables, they’re still bickering good-naturedly. Gilbert refuses to let Anne plant the carrots, “because you mocked me,” and she laughs and says “Fine, more for you to do, then.” Her arms are covered in dirt – she doesn’t like gardening with gloves – and her knees are caked in the stuff, too. 

It’s not a cold day by any means, and she and Gilbert are both clad in warm-weather clothes – her overall shorts, which she cut herself, and her rolled-up shirt, and his t-shirt and jeans, the former being thin and quite small and sticking to his skin in ways that a shirt that he might wear to school would certainly not. It’s a Gilbert she’s familiar with, this yardwork Gilbert, one that she shares a bit of time with each year, and she can’t help but think that this is a variation of her favorite Gilbert. Especially as he grins at her, swiping his ungloved hand across his forehead to push back his curls and leaving a smudge of black dirt, especially as he pats down the earth around the tiny seeds and whispers encouragement to them, especially as he stands over her to observe her tomato-planting technique.

“I can’t believe you’ve never planted tomatoes before,” she says, and he crouches right behind her right shoulder, almost close enough to rest his chin there. If she turned her head to look at him, he’d be so close their cheeks would touch. 

It scares her, how bad she wants it.

“Just never had the time,” he sighs, and then he actually does lean on her shoulder, and _oh holy shit._

Anne shows him how to pat down the earth and leave some of the silt bits loose, and how to apply the tomato wire cages, and how to thread the vines of the tomato through the wire, and then falls backward onto her sit bones and leans her head against Gilbert’s, who hasn’t much moved from his position against her shoulder. 

If Marilla were to show up, she’d probably chide the two of them for not working, but she’d insist on photographing the pair as they leaned against each other. Anne almost wants her to. She wants proof that this Gilbert exists and that he’s leaning on _her_.

“Can you pass me my water?” she asks softly, eyes closed against the sun, and he shifts a little to oblige. She’s ruined the moment, but any longer and she would have screamed. 

He ends up having to stand up and cross the garden bed to find her metal bottle, abandoned back when they were planting the zucchini on the opposite side from the tomatoes, and she stands to catch it. It’s warm, which means the water will be warm, too, which means she might gag from the awkward relief that lukewarm water brings to her throat. Diana likes to tease her for only liking chilled water, but Diana doesn’t live on a farm and doesn’t ever do any yardwork, so Anne often says she’s just never suffered enough.

Luckily, when she tilts the water bottle back, she’s met with only a few droplets. Unluckily, she is actually thirsty. 

“ _O churl_ ,” she says to Gilbert, tossing him the empty bottle back, “ _drunk all, and left no friendly drop to help me after?_ ” 

He laughs, unscrewing the top, as Bash and Mary approach from behind him. “We must’ve cleaned it out.”

“Don’t interrupt me, Blythe,” Anne chides, leaping from the raised bed and crossing to his position to stick her pointer finger in his chest. “I was monologuing! Now. _I will kiss thy lips. Haply some poison doth yet hang upon them._ ” 

Bash chortles from behind the pair of them, Mary smiling in her lopsided way beside him. They’ve got a few remaining packets of seeds in their hands and a shovel between the two of them.

Gilbert shoves the water bottle into Anne’s chest and leaps down so he’s on the same plane as her, shoving his face in hers, nose to nose. “ _To make me die with a restorative!_ ” he yells, smiling, blinding, and she chokes out a laugh, pushing him off of her. 

“The hell was that?” Bash asks, expression of amusement creeping across his face and eyebrows. 

“Eh, inside joke,” Gilbert says, and nods at the seed packets. “Got more to do, or can we get the chicken wire around the plants put up?” 

“ _That’s_ an inside joke?” Bash questions.

“It’s Shakespeare,” Anne explains. “Really kind of a long story.”

Mary nudges Bash with her elbow, a silent cue to tell him to leave it alone. He deflates a little, clearly interested in whatever it was that made Gilbert act like that. 

Anne wasn’t totally sure, either, but she liked the joke well enough, and she liked having _something_ with Gilbert. She liked getting up in his face and yelling Shakespeare at him. However strange it may have been.

“ _But_ ,” Anne says, tossing the empty water bottle at Gilbert again, “we have much time while we put up the chicken wire, and who am I to decline an opportunity to tell a story?”

Bash’s whole face lights up. Beside him, climbing onto the raised bed again, retrieving the chicken wire from beside one of the fence posts, Gilbert’s sunburnt cheeks split into a grin, too. Even Mary has the decency to look intrigued as she grabs the watering can and begins to sow the seeds further into the black soil.

“It better be an embarrassing one about Gilbert,” Bash warns, “else it’s no good at all.”

“Well, it’s a little humiliating for _me_ …” Anne laughs, and Gilbert, passing by her to retrieve the staple gun from their tool stack, shoves her into the post she’s standing next to.

“Embarrass me and you die, Shirley-Cuthbert,” he threatens, and she rolls her eyes to the sky, trying her best to ignore the flowers blossoming in her chest, tomato vines wrapping their way around her heart. 

…

Ruby’s sweet seventeen warranted an occasion of great decoration and celebration and giggling and tea cakes, and Diana’s three-story Colonial with the baby blue trim and croquet set permanently installed in the side yard was the only place where such prim and proper ladies could attend such a celebration. Anne and Diana were tasked with setting up the surprise party, Jane with getting Ruby to Diana’s without suspicion, Tillie with inviting other guests, and Josie with bringing the cake. Together, the girls wanted to celebrate the baby of their midst in her journey to her seventeenth year of life. 

“It’s so strange to think about the fact that Ruby turns seventeen, and not a week later I’ll turn eighteen,” Anne says to Diana as they bustle about one of the Barry household’s three sitting rooms. Anne sets the table delicately, long fingers deftly remembering which side of the tiny plates the salad forks landed on, while Diana sets up a collection of doilies to act as a resting place for the gifts. 

“Perhaps,” Diana hums. “But really I just think you’re old, Anne.”

Anne pokes her in the ribs with the blunt end of a knife, and Diana giggles.

The girls settle into an easy rhythm, Diana singing _Seventeen_ by Peach Pit idly, Anne continuing to sort knives and forks and spoons and glasses into their proper places. She’d worn a real dress for this, one of her favorites, a green skirt that came to her knees and a white lace top, paired with her sensible boots in case of outdoor activity. 

“Late Aprils are always my favorite time of year,” Anne sighs, breathing in the scent of the cherry tree right beside the open window of the parlor. “The rain’s letting up and the crops are almost all planted, and the gardens are just getting planted, too, and you’ve got the promise of summer but it still smells like spring and rosebuds, and it’s just warm enough to wear shorts but still cool enough for skirts somedays.”

Diana, turning to admire the view out the front window, a view unparalleled in all the town, looking through the boughs of a cherry tree onto a brook and the hint of the downtown area beyond it, sighs, too. “I like it because exams are just around the corner, but you don’t have to start worrying quite yet, and you’re more concerned with the awards ceremonies and the end of sports seasons and prom.”

“Prom!” Anne exclaims, setting down the crystal pitcher of lemon-infused water and grabbing Diana’s hands. “Aren’t you the luckiest girl in town, to be going with _Jerry_.”

“Oh, shut _up_ , Anne,” she laughs, “he’s quite romantic when he sets his mind to it. Anyway, you’re one to talk, Miss _I-asked-Gilbert-Blythe-and-he-said-yes-without-even-thinking-about-it_.”

“Only because we _agreed_ we would go together this year and we both wanted to ask each other in public in a ridiculous manner –”

“ _Christ_ , Anne, you really are thick sometimes!” Diana laughs. “Obviously, he only wanted to go with you because he’s _head_ over _heels_ –”

“You’re out of your mind,” Anne says resolutely, returning to her task of filling the crystal wineglasses with water. “I should have you institutionalized. Absolutely mad, you are.”

 _Wouldn’t it be something_ , she thought, _wouldn’t it be something, though, if he were in love_. If he were.

“Don’t say I didn’t try to tell you,” Diana warns. She disappears to find Tillie and Josie, to receive approval on the decorations. Diana consistently doubts her abilities as party planner, despite the fact that she was the best of any of them. The rest of the gang has regularly fucked up the decorations for Diana’s party year after year, so much so that it’s a joke among them that one day Diana will just take over the planning for her own surprise party.

Anne continues the song Diana had left off, since it’s stuck in her head, and loses herself quickly in her work with filling the glasses. The pitcher is quite small – _for prim ladies who don’t drink their fair share of water_ , Anne thinks – and she runs out before filling Ruby’s glass, the last of them all. 

“ _O churl,_ ” she mutters, “ _drunk all, and left no friendly drop to help me after? _”__

“What?” Diana says, reappearing at the door.

“Oh,” Anne chuckles, “nothing. Just something we say when we run out of drink, is all.”

“ _We?_ ”

“Me and Gilbert.”

“You and Gilbert have an inside joke that sounds like _that_?”

“It’s Shakespeare –”

“You and Gilbert have an inside joke where you quote _Shakespeare_ at each other?”

“ _Romeo and Juliet_ –”

“Anne!” Diana shouts, eyes lit up with the pretty smile Anne is ever so fond of. _It makes your dimples look so pretty, Di, I love it,_ Anne had said when she mentioned it last, grinning back in her crooked way. “You mean to say that you and Gilbert – Gilbert! – have an inside joke where you quote a line from _Romeo and Juliet_ at each other? And you mean to say he’s _not_ interested?”

“It’s from the bit where they’re dying,” Anne scoffs, retreating to the kitchen to refill the pitcher, “ _hardly_ the most romantic scene –”

“Are you kidding me!” she shrieks. Covering Anne’s shoulders with her hands, Diana takes a calming breath and sighs. “Come on, Leo and Claire had _total_ chemistry in that scene, with the poison and all that –”

“ _Enough_ , Di,” Anne whispers, voice a little shaky. Diana pulls back and her mouth crumples into a pity smile. “I don’t really want to think about it right now. I just want to be friends with him, okay?” 

“Friends with who?” Tillie asks, appearing at the door, flanked by Josie. 

“Nobody,” Diana says brightly, turning around and grinning at the girls. “Did you see the room? Go look and tell me what I can do better.” As the others leave the room, Anne takes another shaky breath and presses her head against the cool refrigerator. Diana gives her shoulders a final rub before disappearing with the other girls.

Thinking about Gilbert beyond simple matters, like on friend levels, or whether or not he would burn the water while he was making pasta for dinner again, makes her head spin. Damn the fragile constitutions of women from the seventeenth century that had been passed down through her lineage! If she was the fainting type, she would have done it by now.

It is entirely too much to ask her to sort out years of casual interactions, years of shared car rides and textbooks and studying and gardening and cooking. Entirely too much to decide upon in the course of one day, at that! Entirely too much to ask her to leave the headspace of Ruby’s party to ponder on it, so she doesn’t. 

And as Jane tugs Ruby into the beautifully decorated sitting room, and as Anne finishes pouring the water into Ruby’s wineglass, and as they sing to Ruby and slice cake and play croquet badly, Anne focuses on just being present in the moment, present with the girls, drinking from her cup without comment. And later, when Anne stays to help Diana clean the lipstick stains from the crystal, and Diana tells her about how Jerry asked her to prom with a passage from _Frankenstein_ , Anne focuses on laughing at the right times and not shattering, like glass, like crystal wineglasses stained with ladies’ lips.

When she makes the forty-minute drive home from downtown to the outskirts of Avonlea, she tries not to think about Gilbert’s cheek on hers, breath mixing at the mouth, how the skin under his eyes wrinkles to hide a layer of tiny freckles.

She’s listened to every song on her phone with him. It’s harder _not_ to think of him.

She calls him instead.

“Got a book beside you?”

He affirms.

“Will you read me a passage?”

His sigh settles in her heart, stills her racing pulse, beating to a repetitive tune. If he were, if he were, if he were.

“ _I send you here a sort of allegory…_ ”

...

The door to the hospital bangs open, loud, loud, _loud_ , and it startles the few people who are crazy enough to be in a waiting room at six in the morning. Anne’s lost the capability to care at this point. She’ll go mad with worry before she returns to think about the way the man sitting two seats left of the main doors leapt in the air as she stormed into the waiting room.

Gilbert’s roommate is arguing with a nurse at the front desk when Anne skids to a stop behind him, squeezing his shoulder and saying, “I’m here, I’m here, what’s going on?”

“They admitted him hours ago,” Gilbert’s roommate, Harley, says, and the black circles under his eyes are proof of his confession. “I just want to get Gilbert’s phone back, so I can call his friends the LaCroixes –”

“No worries,” Anne interrupts. “Called them right after you hung up with me.” 

Harley visibly deflates, worry leaking out of him. Anne keeps rubbing his shoulder blades, afraid if she stops, she might collapse. 

“What is it?” she asks.

The nurse, bored, probably exhausted, an hour from her shift’s end, answers. “Bad case of the flu combined with a normal case of strep. Sounds like he took too much cold medicine – must have forgot he already took a dosage – and passed out. Heart rate was super high, fever was ridiculous when his roommate here brought him in. He should be okay. The overdose’s worn off by now. We got him out of unconsciousness. But that fever’ll be hell to fight. And it’s still too dangerous to give him any cold medicine right now, so he’s just got to make it through.”

Anne’s biting her lower lip so much she can taste blood. The coppery taste permeates her mouth and throat, reminding her of the copper spokes of her bike, the copper of pennies, the taste of life. 

“Now that you’re here,” Harley says, “I think I’ll go back to the dorm and try to sleep. I’ve got an exam.”

She shoos him with her free hand, promising to call if anything happened, and turns back to the nurse.

“Can I have his phone?”

“Gotta be properly disinfected and returned to the patient or patient’s family.”

“I _am_ family,” Anne pleads, voice breaking.

The nurse sighs and wipes the phone down with a Clorox wipe before sliding it across the counter.

“Can I see him?” 

“If you promise not to tell anyone that you aren’t family,” she relents, and Anne could cry from relief.

This door she opens more carefully, the lights dimmed in this room to help him sleep. There are a terrifying number of machines hooked up to his body. Normally tall and present in a room, this Gilbert is small, broken, dying. The bottles of cold medication he must have taken in order to pass out like this are lying, abandoned, on the side table, along with a button that must have been for emergency alert of a nurse or doctor. Gilbert does not belong on this bed. He belongs above it, fighting for the person lying here, fighting for _their_ health and life.

She understands why John never wanted to die like this. It’s not the Blythe way, to go down hooked to machines, to be small in the face of danger.

There is a chair beside his bed, where she will pay penance. Swinging her backpack full of supplies that she’d toted from Providence to Cambridge, she settles in, grasping the hand nearest to her and wiping the sweat from his forehead.

Her elbow knocks the abandoned cold medicine, and it clatters to the floor, next to her backpack. She stifles a sob with her free hand. 

“ _O churl, drunk all, and left no friendly drop to help me after?_ ” she whispers through the knot in her throat.

There are a thousand things she should have said. A thousand things she could have done, if she’d had more courage, if she’d known how quickly things could change. When he wakes, she’ll do penance for keeping secrets.

For now, she buries her head in the linens, against his side, and grips his hand. 

_I will kiss thy lips._

It sounds like a promise.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. "O churl..." is from Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_. Thank you thank you thank you to lillyre on tumblr for the beautiful drawing that got my creative juices flowing.  
> 2\. "I send you here a sort of allegory..." is a line from Tennyson's poem of the same name. I once read [A World Where It's Always June by humanlighthouse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14906753) and Gilbert reads some Tennyson there and uh, yeah.  
> 
> 
> ...
> 
>   
> Want more of my modern Anne & Gilbert? They're also here: [x](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22767280) [x](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22356223)  
> 
> 
> ...
> 
>   
> find me other places  
> on wattpad: [@ffairlyfloral](https://www.wattpad.com/user/ffairlyfloral)  
> on pinterest: [@ffairlyfloral](https://www.pinterest.com/ffairlyfloral/)  
> or right here on ao3: [@clumsyhearts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/clumsyhearts)


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